Connecticut’s Artists Have Been Hiding in Plain Sight

RIDGEFIELD, Connecticut, Connecticut has been home to a thriving community of artists, including Sol LeWitt, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Barkley Hendricks, Alexander Calder, Yves Tanguy, and Josef and Anni Albers, among many others. But new generations of artists have been making ambitious works in leafy college towns and sleepy suburban enclaves unbeknownst to many of their neighbors.

That’s about to change. Over the next six months, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is showcasing 40 artists based in the Constitution State in its inaugural survey, The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me.

The museum’s mission has supported artists at different stages of their careers, with a particular emphasis on feminism and public artworks, as in its landmark 1971 exhibition, Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, the first feminist group show in the United States, and the more recent homage 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, which included a number of female and nonbinary participants.

Scott Carrillo Azevedo, "Pink Powder Room" (2026)

For its decennial, Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart wanted to share the spirit of discovery she experienced working on MoMA PS1’s Greater New York in 2005 and observing the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA series. An annual or biennial compendium did not seem appropriate for the Aldrich, but Smith-Stewart also wanted to assemble pieces that grappled with a volatile period of United States history.

“All artworks were made within the decade, and I liked the idea of exploring how geopolitical events infiltrated the lives of artists and ended up in their work,” she told Hyperallergic.

Smith-Stewart visited roughly 100 studios across the state before whittling down her cohort to 40 artists. Their works fill every corner of the museum’s early 21st-century exhibition space, required to be set back from Ridgefield’s historic Main Street, not far from a site where British forces broke through a Revolutionary brigade in April 1777.

Kristy Hughes, "Portal: Hope as Practice" (2025)

Visitors will notice the art from the decennial well before stepping into the museum. Venezuelan-born artist Enrique Figueredo’s eight-foot outdoor piece, "Una enfermedad que solamente el oro puede curar (A Sickness Only Gold Can Cure)" (2026), made from hand-carved plywood and acrylic paint and mounted on an aluminum frame, welcomes visitors to the sculpture garden as they back into the museum’s parking lot. Kristy Hughes’s multi-colored sculpture “Portal: Hope as Practice” (2025) consists of two 10-foot loops made with a mix of acrylic, fiberglass, and epoxy resin backed by a steel armature. Hughes also inserted several rocks she collected during visits to Cape Cod and New Mexico as well as poems by Octavia Butler.

“She made it as an act of gratitude to all of those who helped her,” Smith-Stewart said. “The portal is a way of offering possibility and hope.”

Dan Gunn, "Middle Scenery (after the Ride)” (2026)

In the lobby hangs Dan Gunn’s scene of the gradations of a summer sunset radiating over a small Midwestern town. Inspired by Grant Wood’s 1931 painting “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” the Kansas native covered strips of birch plywood and poplar with acrylic and milk paint, then tied the slats together with nylon cord.

Others explore life and culture in New England in the 19th and 20th centuries. Emily Larned’s wall-length installation of risograph prints, “Police Others As You Would Have Others Police You” (2020/2026), documented how a New Haven Police Academy leader changed the organization’s training practices to become more community-minded.

Grace O'Connor, "My Hometown" (2023)

Three romantic works by painter Grace O’Connor, who died in 2026 before the show opened, depict her childhood in working-class Waterbury and the surrounding Naugatuck Valley. O’Connor suffered from ALS and painted one of her works, “Among Strange Silences” (2025), by holding the brush with her mouth, Smith-Stewart said.

Lula Mae Blocton, who moved to the state when she got a job teaching art at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic, incorporated patterns from her African American heritage with frog motifs in reference to an 18th-century myth (the story goes, in 1754 Willimantic residents heard cacophonous noises from the river and thought Native American or French forces were approaching to invade but the sound was from an army of American bullfrogs).

Lula Mae Blocton, "Pride Pyramid" (2022)

Jen Bervin created a cotton batting and muslin quilt based on one of Emily Dickinson’s poems but omitted most of the words, only sewing in the poet’s dashes and other variant markings with red silk thread.

“Jen was interested in the system she used, which shows the elusive beauty of Dickinson’s craftsmanship,” Smith-Stewart said.

The most compelling pieces are by immigrant artists grappling with their dual identities and their communities’ diaspora to the northeast. On the ground floor, Nigerian-American artist Faustin Adeniran sourced scores of aluminum cans that he painstakingly cut up and assembled into a mosaic-like portrait to create “Arewa (Elegance)” (2015).

Arghavan Khosravi, "Seeing/ Not Seeing" (2026)

Some works are wrenching. Iranian-American artist Arghavan Khosravi’s acrylic paintings depict Iranian women grappling with oppression and struggling for freedom in an idyllic landscape. Sudanese-American artist Azza El Siddique made a 3-D stoneware mold of a statue of an Egyptian noblewoman from the Middle Kingdom and placed it on a steel base. The original was moved 400 years ago, then transported again more than a century ago to Boston, where it sits in the Museum of Fine Arts’s collection.

Others were more playful. Scott Carrillo Azevedo, who grew up in Arizona, included two elaborate mixed-media pieces adorned with vintage glass flowers, costume jewelry, painted seat belts, and ceramic birds, resembling a Mexican altar, in honor of his Mexican-American heritage while also asserting his queer identity.

Nearby, Japanese-American artist Aki Sasamoto jerry-rigged a stainless-steel wire, silverware, an AC motor, and a speed controller and timer into two fishing-line contraptions that hang from the ceiling, snapping and jiggling every so often.

The devilishly jarring sound jolts your attention, a reminder that surprises can abound (even in the suburbs).

Azza El Siddique, Begin in smoke, End in ashes Pt. II (2019-2025)

Dan Gunn, "Ungrateful Son, No. 6" (2018)